“My happiest time” or “my saddest time”? The spatial and generational construction of marriage among youth in rural Malawi and Lesotho

Abstract

Marriage among African teenagers is currently a central focus of campaigns by UN agencies and international NGOs. Yet marriage has received only limited attention from geographers and has largely escaped the attention of geographers of youth. In this paper we explore the relational geographies of age that underlie young people's motivations for, and experiences of, marriage in two rural African settings with differing marriage practices: matrilocal southern Malawi and patrilocal Lesotho. We draw on participatory research activities and life history interviews conducted with 80 people aged between 10 and 24 years old. While the young people's attitudes and experiences were varied and complex, starkly different accounts emerged from the two settings. In particular, young women in Lesotho offered very negative assessments of marriage, while those in Malawi were very much more positive. Through these examples, we highlight how young people's marriage choices and experiences are relationally produced. Decisions about whether, when and whom to marry reflect socially entrenched expectations concerning generational allocations of resources, labour and responsibilities, which intersect with contemporary social and economic processes including poverty, unemployment, land scarcity and AIDS. Experiences of marriage, too, are produced through practices that are spatially structured and contextually situated in relation to socio-economic conditions. Thus marriage, as a "vital conjuncture" in young people's lives, plays a key role in the relational construction of individual lifecourses and in (re)constructing relationships of age, gender and, especially, generation.

Measuring Social Norms Related to Child Marriage Among Adult Decision-Makers of Young Girls in Phalombe and Thyolo, Malawi

“…Previous work exploring reasons for child marriage in Malawi found that most young women married because of poverty and, to a lesser extent, unplanned pregnancy [9], while education plays a protective role in delaying age at first marriage [10]. These findings are consistent with findings from other contexts in sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia [3], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15].…”

‘Motherhood in Childhood’: Generational Change in Ethiopia

“…The Young Lives findings resonate with insights from feminist scholars of development who, first, highlight the role of context in making sense of young women's choices and 'empowerment' (Cornwall and Edwards, 2010;Folbre, 1994). For example, attention to the everyday circumstances and material and cultural logics of motherhood in childhood would caution against simple attributions of either victimhood or agency to teenage mothers (Ansell et al, 2018). This requires moving beyond adult-centric approaches that tend to equate motherhood with women and that position children as dependent objects of adult care, these approaches reducing motherhood in childhood to problem, or even 'deviant', childhoods (Caputo, 2018).…”

Boys are tired! Youth, urban struggles, and retaliatory patriarchy

“…This work has been complemented by scholarship highlighting the need to recognise patriarchy's empirical complexity and institutional variations both spatially and temporally (Duncan, 1994; Hopkins, 2006; Jackson, 1991; Smith, 1990). In terms of geographical research on gender relations in Africa specifically, a rich body of work can be found using the previously mentioned approaches and addressing similar themes in the sub‐disciplines of critical development studies (Ardayfio‐Schandorf, 2002; Daley, 2008; Sharp et al., 2003) and geographies of children and youth (Ansell et al., 2018; Jones & Chant, 2009; Porter et al., 2011).…”